


friendly competition

by furyspook



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Compliant, Gen, Indeterminate timeline, Original Character Death(s), post-season 3-ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-27
Updated: 2019-03-27
Packaged: 2019-12-18 17:20:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18254372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/furyspook/pseuds/furyspook
Summary: Jon takes several statements, and then a little more.(some warnings for, hm. descriptions of eyes where eyes have no business being. a bit of bone crushing. it gets a little squicky.)





	friendly competition

**Author's Note:**

> the phone call was coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE

Harry Forrester set himself apart from the other monsters what had let themselves into the Institute in that he walked through the front door. Right to the front desk, to hear it told, and quite politely he’d asked after the head archivist.

Jon was informed ahead of time, of course, so that he could collect his materials and meet a member of the public who’d wanted to give a statement. It wasn’t long before he, Basira, and Forrester were all in a room together, but even before the door opened Jon could feel it on the other side like a scouring pad over his skin. Something in that man was working him over before he’d even laid eyes on Jon, reading him through the hollow walls. 

The door opened and the room turned suddenly very warm, as if the lights had gotten brighter and the air had stopped venting. 

Jon stood from his chair to dismiss Basira and found that she didn’t seem particularly inclined to stay, quickly excusing herself back into the archives proper. Were Jon’s visitors that normal, now? And were his assistants so used to the monsters at their door that they would just leave him at their mercy? He was hardly given the time to consider it before Harry demanded his attention again.

Harry was moving, catching Jon’s eye and drawing him out of his thoughts. The man-- or the thing which looked like a man --folded his hands politely before his middle and grinned, opening his posture and standing to his full height. If it was meant to reassure, it did not. 

“Archivist!” Harry said sunnily, “Pleasure to meet you!” 

“I can't say the same.” Jon returned. He didn’t have the patience for this act. If he had any sense at all, Harry already knew as much.

“But, Archivist, you don’t know a thing about me! What if-- and here’s a thought --I just wanted to be friendly?” 

“I don’t do ‘friendly’ with monsters.” Jon tipped up his chin to glare more directly into the man’s eyes. “So save us an argument, and tell me what you want.”

There was a subtle shift in the air around his guest, but Harry’s smile didn’t waver. If Jon were anybody else he may not have noticed any change at all, but as it were they had a sort of… _energy_ between them, which pushed and pulled in equal amounts. Jon wouldn’t play nice, but he would endure this creature until he understood it for the sake of his own curiosity. 

“Alright, then,” Harry sighed _just_ too dramatically, and he sat in the chair opposite Jon’s. “I’m here to give you my statement. You still do that, right, Archivist? Take statements from volunteers?”

Jon didn’t deign to answer, instead sinking stiffly back into his chair and waiting for his guest to do the same. It was still a moment longer before Harry followed, and in those few seconds Jon tried not to give the impression of somebody as disturbed as he really felt under that vicious stare. He didn’t bother to mask his irritation. Leave it to an avatar to come in unannounced and unsettle the life out of you, and leave it to Jon to antagonize it. 

He didn’t reach for the tape recorder, either-- he knew that it was already recording, in just the same way he knew that the archives themselves were waiting for Harry to speak.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me?” Harry prompted. He’d folded his hands again, this time on the tabletop. Jon was at once grateful that he could see them and paranoid that they were cupped.

Jon cleared his throat. “Statement of Harry Forrester, concerning…” 

“Concerning several interactions with avatars of The Beholding.” Harry offered. 

Despite himself Jon felt his curiosity mount, and that feeling around them like an anticipatory caught breath only heightened. “Statement taken directly from subject, Fifth November, Twenty-seventeen... Statement begins.”

The grin on Harry’s face told Jon that he knew just how much the Archivist wanted to hear this, but Jon couldn’t bring himself to care anymore. He wanted to know-- rather, he felt that awful  _ need _ to know. Which meant that The Eye wanted him to know. Which was worse, both because it meant that Jon had no choice but to listen, and because Jon didn’t want to give it the satisfaction of knowing that he was already hooked.

Jon put The Beholding out of his mind. Harry began his statement. 

“Once I was a young man in Reading working the counter in a café. Boring job, you know. People wouldn’t pay any attention to me, but as I had nothing to do I took up watching them. After a while I could do nothing  _ but _ notice them, down to the last detail. Their eyes never met mine for long, so I used the time while they scanned our menu boards to take in the look of them. Little things, like the way their brows furrowed or the ways their mouths quirked. Sometimes I could swear that I knew what they were going to sound like before they even began to speak.

“For a few months it went on like that, and I thought that it was just a weird little talent of mine: ‘the boy who could predict a very specific, pointless thing’. I started to get bored of it, even. I ignored it. And then one day, a woman appeared in my shop. She stood out because I couldn’t hear her, in my head. Her face didn’t move in quite the way another person’s would have. I had nothing to work off of. She was dead silent.

“All that I could think to ask was who she was. I couldn’t help it-- it had been so  _ long _ since I couldn’t hear someone, and everything else went completely out of my mind. She smiled, then, but still I could discern nothing from her.

‘Molly,’ she said, and then she ordered. I don’t remember  _ what _ she ordered, it wasn’t important. Something without caffeine, I think. It was just an average coffee order, which only made my need to know stronger. She couldn’t have been normal, or I would have read her like a book. For the next several hours she was sat there by the window drinking the same cup of coffee, and I couldn’t stop looking over at her. She was never looking back at me, though, just out into the street. It felt very pointed, actually, and when I came out of the back room after my shift to find her looking at me I knew that it must have been. 

“She didn’t bother to act surprised, and didn’t even bother to greet me. Her expression was as unreadable as ever, but I knew that she wanted me to ask. Whatever was on my mind. So I asked. I asked, ‘who are you?’ and Molly answered that she was a grad student at the university nearby. It felt like the wrong answer, but I didn’t know how to say so. I asked ‘what did you come here for?’ and she told me that she’d come in for a coffee, and again it felt blatantly incorrect. I asked her why she wasn’t drinking it and she told me that she was, and this time I knew that she was lying to me because I’d been watching her nurse it for most of my shift. I could  _ see _ the coffee over the rim of her mug from my side of the table. This time I told her that I knew that she was lying, and Molly started to laugh at me.

“‘Of course I’m lying,’ she said, ‘but I wasn’t sure you would actually confront me!’ Like it was a joke, or something! 

“I heard her speak and more than that I heard her laughing at me, but even while it was happening I had to wonder if her mouth was even open at all. Her voice felt tacky in my ears, but it had nothing in it-- there wasn’t a _ person _ behind it at all. She was entirely empty. Other people in the café were chattering and I could hear all of them-- it was only _ her  _ who I couldn’t be sure of. Something was wrong with  _ her _ . 

“I told her to leave. She told me that she’d expected more from me, but leave she did. I remember expecting to see more of her, but I never got the chance.

“I waited for an hour at the table before leaving the café for the evening. I didn’t want to risk running into Molly again if she were still lingering about. I remember passing in front of an alleyway, and my feet went out from under me entirely. There was a man, and he had me by the shoulders. It didn’t happen quickly, but it felt like it did. It must have, because I would have fought him off otherwise. I felt him, or something about him… He cut into my head like it were a fruit, and he took me out. I’m with him, now.”

Jon opened his mouth to interrupt against his own instinct, but Harry held up one hand to stop him. The look on his face was a warning, and though it melted back into that smile again quickly once it had appeared and Jon had settled himself the intent behind it stuck with the archivist, and his fingers fidgeted over the tabletop. Harry must have been working his way to his point, yes? Not that Jon couldn’t infer…  _ exactly _ what that point was just fine.

He didn’t dare take his eyes off of Harry, but he fumbled for his pen. 

“At another time I was a librarian in a Scandinavian village. I liked to work the closing shift so that I had the building to myself and nobody would notice that I’d put off the re-shelving to read the books instead. I couldn’t get enough of them. The longer I lingered over each one the more I started to notice how they were handled by whoever had returned them: pages warped under sweating fingers, dog-ears encompassing entire half-pages, crumbs in the spines… If I focused very hard I could imagine who and what had happened to put those marks there, and over time I realized that it wasn’t my imagination. I really did know. I had their faces down to the smallest detail, and I saw the exact moment a book was dropped to the floor, edges-first. Now, obviously, this isn’t the sort of thing that you  _ tell _ people,” 

If he looked-- if he  _ really _ looked --Jon could see eyes behind the skin and bone make-up of Harry’s forehead: wide, round, and obsidian. Not only could they see him, Jon knew, but they could read him like he read a statement, and they were trying. He could feel them worming around at the edges of his consciousness even as Harry spun his tale.

“And it didn’t stop there. I started to see the histories of other things, as well. The building on the corner that’s older than most of the city, a street lamp with a peculiar tilt, a passing car. It was almost overwhelming on a busy street-- I started to take the back roads to work to avoid people and their things. Not that that mattered, in the end.

“It was a phonograph that caught me. I could see it in the window of an antiques shop I passed on my new route to work every morning and evening, and it had an incredible presence. I’d find myself stopping to stare at it through the glass for minutes at a time, and once I was so mesmerized that I was late for my shift. It was that evening that I resolved to do whatever I needed to do to get out of this loop. I bought the phonograph that night, and it was a close thing to get it back to my flat before I needed to study it. 

“The piece didn’t come with any records, just a slip of paper denoting its manufacturer and its age. It would have seemed completely innocuous if I hadn’t been feeling its pull in my head for weeks. It sat on my coffee table and I sat on the floor in front of it, and I started to feel incredibly foolish for having bought this expensive piece of garbage on a—a gut feeling.

“Then I noticed a chip in the wooden base, and I knew that it’d collided with the wall behind it when a man had been shoved into its pedestal. The man fell back, dashed his head against the decorative foot of the pedestal and died instantly. I was horrified, but more than that I was more curious than ever what might’ve happened before. My fingers brushed the backside of the phonograph and I dug deeper into its history, feeling the serrated wood, and beyond that over a tiny notch in the paneling. I saw then that this could be opened, and dug in my nails to pull the catch free. Once my hand touched the interior I knew that it had hidden a great deal of things before it came to me: pocket knives, pills, legal documents, and uncountable dead insects… The interior of the phonograph was coated in dust, and in that I could feel the blood and the dirt and the minuscule metal shavings off of the mechanisms, the wood itself and the great tree it had been long,  _ long _ ago. I felt that if I could just reach back a little farther I could follow this phonograph to the dawn of life itself, but I never got the chance.”

Jon leaned forward over the table with his pen still clasped like a dagger in his fist, anticipating the end of Harry’s story. It needed to end, eventually. If Harry was recounting what Jon thought he was, surely it  _ must _ have been close to its end. 

“I think now that he must have come in through the window. I didn’t notice him, as I was busy feeling for ancient tree trunks in the back compartment of a phonograph at the time, but I knew him when he touched me. I knew what he was going to do to me, because I saw him do it to the others. I was torn open and devoured, along with my stories, and he keeps me still.”

Again Jon opened his mouth to speak and was silenced by a long, sharp-eyed stare. Harry’s eyes were alight with glee now, and anticipation, and Jon no longer wanted to find out why.

“Stop.” He demanded. “Stop talking!” But Harry wasn’t listening.

“I remember being an old German woman who’d watch the cars roll by while I sat on my porch to read. It was quiet, but if I concentrated very hard on that quiet I could hear the roar of their engines long before I could see them--”

“Stop! You’ve made your point!”

“--After I learned to see the packages in their trunks it was just two days before a tall man with dark hair forced his way into my kitchen, shattering the glass window above the doorknob to let himself in! He had a wallet in his pocket, and a knife in his other, and he was far too fast for me to outrun him--”

“Shut up!” Jon straightened and raised his pen, holding it between stiff and shaking fingers. It was a painfully tight grip, knuckle-white, but it was only a pen. Jon felt no safer this way, but he stabbed down at the air between them despite how pitiful the weapon made him feel. Harry was unmenaced.

He continued, “As a child in Manchester I caught The Eye’s attention after digging out an anthill in my yard, staring into the tunnels I’d destroyed and feeling a stirring of curiosity for their culture that I couldn’t abate with my imagination--”

“What are you trying to tell me?” 

Harry cut himself off. His lips were still pulled into that grin, his eyes still shining wickedly, but he seemed to consider Jon’s question. Jon was grateful for the reprieve, his stomach in knots and winding tighter with every second that passed. If Harry had been recounting his encounters with avatars of The Beholding, then this story only ended one way.

“There are a number of us, aren’t there, Archivist? After all, there’s so much to take in out there!”

Jon’s twitching fingers froze in clumsy, uncomfortable positions while he watched watched Harry’s eyes widen to impossible disks, while he felt the eyes under Harry’s skin roll to ogle him. He still held his pen, but it felt even more useless than before under this much scrutiny. In the heat of the statement room under the glare of the eyes and The Eye and the lights and the walls and the living swell of the archives Jon felt very, very small. 

“But we know that there isn’t enough to go around. Not if we want to be good little avatars and take up our patron’s mantle.” Harry set his hands on the table and pushed himself to his feet, never taking his eyes off of Jon. “Which means that one of us is going to die today. And I  _ promise you _ that it won’t be me.”

As Jon watched the bright green of Harry’s eyes threaded through with impenetrable, smooth black, flickering and widening until at once they had pinned him in place.

“Now hold still, and  _ tell me about  _ **_yourself_ ** .” 

In something of a panic Jon shouted, demanding, before he could be overtaken by the compulsion, “ **_Who are you?_ ** ” Harry rounded the table, circling Jon like a predator circles its prey. 

Jon’s mouth now moved of its own accord, speaking his earliest memories: his room, his family, his books-- things that he didn’t consciously remember himself, pouring out of him in a stream that showed no signs of stopping, gradually growing faster and spilling over more quickly than Jon thought that any words could really be spoken and understood. 

If the room had been hot before then it was sweltering now, weighing him down, burning across his face in flashes of insufferable heat. Their eyes were locked on each-others still, and behind them Jon could feel the pressure of another mind bearing down into his. Harry was pushing to his center, where Jon knew that he would begin to take. This wasn’t compulsion; it was thievery. Stealing Jon. Taking the things that made him himself, his experiences and his reactions, his emotions and his everything. Jon hadn’t the option to grit his teeth, memories still spilling from his mouth and turning more rapidly over his tongue, though everything in him wanted to make it stop.

He didn’t want this to happen-- He couldn’t _ let _ this happen-- But how to make it  _ stop? _ How do you fight something with your words when your words are what it  _ wants? _

The other man advanced and Jon tried in vain to break whatever hold Harry had over him. He tried to stop himself from speaking, to call out for help from one of the others, but only succeeded in raising his voice to go on about his primary school reading lessons. 

The chair under him rumbled, scraped across the floor as Harry pulled it away from the table. Jon’s panic flared again with his hands so close to his shoulders, his head, his neck, his  _ face _ \-- 

Harry was breathing very close to his ear and Jon could just hear him over the secondary school mixer where he’d been punched by somebody who by rights should’ve been finished with their mandatory education. “I  _ really _ thought that this would be hard.”

Jon inhaled sharply around an apology to the lunch attendant and plunged his pen through his cheek.

Harry sprang back from his chair and Jon rocked unsteadily to his feet, leaning heavily on the backrest to turn himself, lock eyes with the other avatar. “ _ You, _ ” 

Jon watched Harry’s brow quiver. That uncertainty could be exploited. It would lessen his hold over Jon’s mind. 

“ **_Tell me who you are!_ ** ” 

Distantly he heard the doorknob rattling in its housing. He did not recall locking the door. But then, it wasn’t his to lock.

Harry was speaking, a low mutter at such a speed that Jon shouldn’t have been able to understand it as well as he did. He took a step forward. Harry took a step back. Another step, and another, and he had backed Harry into the wall. 

Jon took Harry’s hands in either of his and squeezed them, his own fingers bending in unnatural ways to crush the flesh between them. Categorizing, memorizing every line and callous on those hands. Knowing them like he might have known his own skin. Instead of the sick twist he’d come to expect, that disgusted human riot in his gut, Jon felt something oil-slick and warm roll down his spine, throughout his body, down to the very tips of his fingers. He leaned in very close, and it might have been that his mouth was finally closed. Harry’s wide eyes to stared into his. 

Jon watched Harry’s eyes fade, black blurring into green blurring into grey, but he watched also the young man in the café, the librarian hunched over a stack of worn paperbacks, the elderly woman who tracked the hauling trucks past her home, the boy in orange in his destructive pit. A woman wearing hairclips, a student holding three stacked bowls, a bus driver in a dark carpark. He watched their lives play out in his mind, all at once but painting each as a distinct picture nonetheless. It was like nothing else he’d ever felt: exhilarating, energizing, warming him from his toes to his forehead and deeper, deeper...

“Jon!” It overlapped, many voices at once and just staggered enough to really  _ be _ a multitude, rather than the three, six,  _ ten _ that he had taken from Forrester. Jon’s eyes opened,-- and he realized that they had been closed --flickered wildly to Basira, to Melanie, to Martin in the doorway, and then they fell to the body on the floor. 

_ Christ, _ there was a body on the floor!

Harry Forrester lay in a jagged heap at his feet, and while he knew that it couldn’t be possible he lay there with his bones jutting out from the paper of his skin like there was nothing underneath. Jon felt something in his throat  _ roll _ .

Whatever pleasant wave had caught him following the attack had left him utterly wretched, now. The others watched him from a distance, fear and loathing overtaking the concern on their faces as they put the pieces together for themselves. What would they think? He needed to fix it. When his mouth opened, sore and dry, Jon found that the words wouldn’t come.  _ He tried to take me! _ He rasped, “ _ He-- _ ” and choked on the new weight beside his windpipe, and as he felt it reel again he knew that through his skin Harry’s eyes took in Melanie’s disgusted snarl and every twitch of her unarmed fingers. He could see it himself.

There was a body on the floor. He'd put it there.

Jon thought about Harry’s ultimatum and about the victims he’d absorbed, the ones that now belonged to Jon. He thought about Elias, safe behind the bars of his jail cell. About how Elias must have been enjoying the show.

His head swam, the bulk of his new knowledge, new  _ lives _ thrashing like unsteady surf against his skull, and though Jon could hear his coworkers scrambling and shouting on his every side he couldn’t focus and he couldn’t answer. 

Jon lost his lunch, and then promptly lost consciousness.

**Author's Note:**

> so im Really new here! like really new here! and i have a really bad memory, so if any of this is blatantly non-canon-compliant just uh. ignore it, i didn't try to do it that way.   
> i was meant to be doing homework, but then i asked myself, 'don't you want jon to eat somebody with his brain?' and i said yes, because of course i do. 
> 
> if u wanna talk @ me about mag (please do i need to Speak) my podcast blog is @onlyinthepasttense on tumblr


End file.
